Monday, January 7, 2013

First Day Here

Well, let's see. We are in Paris for a week, for the first time sharing the apartment with friends from home. We have been here for 24 hours, with the weather in typical Paris winter mode-- overcase skies, occasional low clouds over the top of the Eiffel Tower, occasional drizzle, no hard rain. Temperature in the 40s, not cold, warm.

 

We often arrive here on a Saturday, and Sunday is market day at the Grenelle market right here, but also the last day for the marche au pouces at Vanves, our favorite place for flea market shopping. So, every time, we decide that we will need to get up in the morning to squeeze them both in before lunch, and just as we do every time we overslept, it is now 1030 and there isn't time to to both, in fact there may not be time to do either. Oh well, we'll see.

 

Yesterday, first thing we did after arriving, basically exhausted, was to go for crepes at La Blanche Hermine, the little creperie that is just around the corner, almost in our building. It's a cute little place run by two women, downstairs with stone walls. Creperies are one of those categories of French restaurants that are virtually all the same in some ways. All Brittany-themed, whether or not they are actually run by Bretonnes, all with very similar menus. Crepes salees (savory) filled with every possible combination of five or six ingredients, listed out one at a time-- egg, cheese, ham, egg and cheese, egg and ham, etc. Egg, ham and cheese is called a complete. Hard cider to drink, dry (brut) or sweet (doux), served from a pitcher into what look like round coffee mugs. The egg crepes have a sunnyside egg cooked into the middle of them. Savory crepes are made with a buckwheat flour called sarrazin. Then dessert crepes are made with white flour-- and all the French families in the Creperie do the whole thing, cider and savory crepe and dessert. We had salted caramel and chocolate-banana.

As I write this it occurs to me that I have probably written about creperies before, oh well. Good to do something....